We use CQC Insight to monitor potential changes to the quality of care that you provide.

CQC Insight brings together in one place the information we hold about your services, and analyses it to monitor your service at provider, location, or core service level. This will help us to decide what, where and when to inspect and provide analysis to support the evidence in our inspection reports.

Sharing CQC Insight with you

CQC Insight produces monitoring reports, which we will share with your trust. This will enable us to have an ongoing conversation about quality during your regular relationship management meetings with your local CQC relationship holder. We will also share the reports with other key partners including NHS England, NHS Improvement, clinical commissioning groups and Healthwatch. You will receive access rights to see your reports when the Insight product for your sector is ready.

Changes in the quality of care

Our inspectors will check CQC Insight regularly. If it suggests an improvement or decline in the quality of care for a service, we may follow this up between inspections, or ask you for further information or explain the reasons during our regular relationship management meetings. We may also decide at our internal planning meeting to re-inspect that service. If there are significant concerns we may carry out a focused inspection.

What CQC Insight shows us

For all NHS trusts, CQC Insight gives inspectors:

Facts and figures: contextual and descriptive information such as levels of activity, staffing and financial information.

A ratings overview: the trust’s latest CQC ratings with information about the direction of potential change suggested by the performance monitoring indicators.

Intelligence overview: a summary of the analysis of the indicators selected to monitor performance. It is presented at provider, key question and, where available, core service level.

Performance monitoring indicators: show a trust’s performance compared with national standards or with other providers. They also indicate changes in a trust’s performance over time, and whether its latest performance is an improvement, decline or about the same as the equivalent period 12 months before. All indicators are mapped to CQC’s five key questions and key lines of enquiry (KLOEs).

Featured data sources: for example, the findings from national surveys, incident reports, mortality ratios and outliers.

We will coordinate our monitoring activities for complex providers that operate across sectors and, where possible, combine information about each of their services within our Insight model.

Sources of information

CQC Insight analyses information from a range of sources and uses common indicators to monitor performance across all types of NHS trusts. This is also tailored to each sector or type of service. For example, CQC Insight for acute hospitals presents findings from relevant national clinical audits and our analysis and follow-up of mortality outliers. CQC Insight for providers of specialist mental health services includes analysis of the findings of our visits to people detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 and relevant notifications under the Act. Where possible, we will present analysis relating to the core services and KLOEs.

When new data becomes available, we will refresh the data in our Insight products as soon as possible.

The content of all our Insight products initially focuses on existing data collections. We are continuing to develop indicators, particularly in relation to the core services and from national clinical audit programmes. We are also looking at ways to improve how we use qualitative information, including views from the public, staff and people who use services. As we develop CQC Insight, we will ask you for feedback so that we can improve it.